Private cloud networks and hybrid cloud networks, which integrate a private cloud network with a public cloud network or with the Internet, may be adopted as an alternative to a traditional IT data-center.
Like other types of clouds, such a private cloud network may offer a catalog of services to users, but unlike a public cloud, resources of the private cloud are privately owned or are managed and maintained by a user or by a third party network-management resource retained by the user for this purpose.
Deploying a private cloud network may be a complex, time-consuming task that may comprise installing, configuring, interfacing, and debugging physical system, infrastructure, and networking resources, hypervisor applications, guest operating systems that each run under a hypervisor, virtual infrastructure, a cloud-management stack, middleware, applications, service catalogs, security systems, maintenance and management tools, virtual networks, and many other resources necessary to implement a cloud-computing environment.
Proprietary tools may in some cases ease this burden by automating an installation of certain components of a cloud-computing environment. But such tools are generally limited to specific virtualized applications, such as a database-management system or an transaction-processing application.
There is no way to automatically install an entire cloud-computing environment from scratch, either on a “bare-metal” platform, onto which no other operating software has been configured, or on a physical platform upon which only a basic virtualization layer has been installed.